Classic Tales of Horror

Classic Tales of Horror is a leather-bound anthology in Canterbury Classics' Leather-bound Classics line, gathering the stories that established horror as a literary form. It runs to nearly nine hundred pages and ranges across the tradition's central modes: psychological horror, the ghost story, the cursed object, the thing at the edge of the lamplight.

The volume collects work by Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Henry James, Washington Irving and others — from vampires and a monkey's paw to an unstoppable heart and haunting apparitions — and opens with a scholarly introduction by Ernest Hilbert, tracing the development of the genre and the debt later writers owe these pioneers.

Because it is an anthology rather than a novel, it reads in pieces: the nineteenth-century pacing is unhurried and the prose is period prose, dense with subordinate clauses and long approach shots. What it offers is a single volume containing most of the machinery the modern genre still runs on.